For more than a century, 210 W. Market St. — a stone's throw from Rosita's Bridge on the River Walk — has been a destination for enlightenment.

Thanks to a $70,000 gift from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in 1900, along with a donation of land from San Antonio's prominent Kampmann family, the city's first free public library opened June 15, 1903, at the downtown location.

After that neoclassical building was razed in 1929 — a flood in 1921 compromised the structural foundation of the Carnegie Library — a new, modern building with art deco accents replaced it. Designed by local architect Herbert S. Green, sheathed in smooth Indiana limestone, the building remained San Antonio's main public library until 1968, when the library moved down to the corner of St. Mary's Street.

The Hertzberg Circus Museum called the former library home until 2001.

Another chapter in the life of the venerable old building begins Saturday, when the 37,000-square-foot Briscoe Western Art Museum opens its doors.

In addition to a complete interior restoration and the creation of themed galleries for the display of a collection that includes more than 700 works of art and artifacts — from John Coleman's monumental bronze “Visions of Change,” which greets visitors in the pristine lobby, to an Apache basket from the late 1800s — the $32 million project plan called for a new building that would serve as a special event space to generate income through rentals.

San Antonio's Lake | Flato Architects designed the restoration of the existing library building as well as the new structure adjacent to it. According to David Lake, principal at Lake | Flato, which also is designing future additions to the Witte Museum campus up the San Antonio River, the idea was “to create a dialogue between the old building and the new.”

“Based on old photographs that we found, there was an old sawmill on that site in the 1800s,” Lake said. “The new building is a modern interpretation of that.”

The three-story, 21,000-square-foot Jack Guenther Pavilion is a modernist structure clad in rough Lueders limestone from a quarry near Abilene and copper sheeting the color of a bronze statue — or an old saddle.

Its hipped roof with a clerestory, supported by an ingenious truss and cable system inspired by the nearby Presa Street bridge, lets light flow into the third-floor space, while exterior details such as window casings echo those of the old building. Although the pavilion is easily accessible to the museum on all three levels, a cabled steel-and-concrete bridge on the second floor is both a literal and metaphorical connection.

“Lake | Flato did a wonderful job of creating this conversation between the old and the new,” said Briscoe Executive Director Steven M. Karr. “In a way, it's a metaphor for San Antonio — rooted in the past, but very forward thinking.”

Inside the museum, the old reading room has been restored to its former glory as the Clingman Education Gallery. Original jewel box bookcases will “weave a narrative,” Karr said, through art and artifacts on the shelves. Crown molding and fluted columns, along with the original tile mantle of a nonworking fireplace, add elegance and warmth to the room, which will serve as a lecture, recital and meeting space. Graphic acoustical panels on the walls — copies of WPA national park posters — help set the mood for what awaits the visitor.

“With the exception of the lobby, the room is the most accurate architecturally to the period,” Karr said. “Whenever possible, Lake | Flato retained and incorporated original elements of the building.”

“This building didn't need anything,” said Matt Wallace, project architect for Lake | Flato. “So we wanted to keep it as close to the original as possible.”

Visitors can enter the museum through the arched main entrance on Market Street, with its original frieze of examples of great world architecture such the Parthenon and the Acropolis (and the Alamo), or from the River Walk, which next year will be the site of a major bronze sculpture of a vaquero driving longhorns from the water.

The main lobby is a breathtaking space, with deep green walls, original art deco lighting fixtures and a beautifully restored coffered ceiling of cast plaster square panels with rosettes in copper, gold and silver.

“When we came on this project, we found a lobby ceiling that had many years of neglect,” said Clint Nieto of Restoration Associates, a local firm that also worked on the Majestic, Aztec and Empire theaters. “There were stress cracks throughout the ceiling. This was not visible until the scaffold was installed and we could actually put our hand on the old plaster.”

Restoration Associates went “Sistine-esque for several months on the ceiling,” Karr said, with workers lying on their backs on scaffolding. They identified original finishes by taking small samples of the plaster and looking at them under a microscope. Several of the panels and capitals had to be recast; everything was painstakingly repainted, including a ring of 8-inch silver medallions resembling Indian head nickels that encircles the room at the top of the walls.

“When we first came in here, the ceiling was sort of brown and black, tobacco-stained from years of smoking and from painting over,” Wallace said.

“The ceiling,” Karr added, “was a Herculean task. But the lobby looks exactly as it did when the building opened in 1930.”

The only work of art in the lobby is the big Coleman bronze, which tells a story of the American West from an Indian's and a cowboy's point of view.

“When I walk into a museum, I want to know why I am here, what am I looking at,” said Karr, who came to the museum from the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. “There is no other art in the lobby because we very much wanted the lobby to be architecture as art.”

From the first floor, which houses the Women of the West Gallery and a reproduction of the late Gov. Dolph Briscoe's office, visitors can take “the grand staircase,” as it was called in the 1929 plans, to upper galleries devoted to such themes as opportunity, movement, work and conflict, the last of which has as a centerpiece an interactive scale model of the Alamo battle.

“There's no chronology,” Karr said. “It's all thematic, what we call a hub-and-spoke approach. You needn't go into one gallery to understand another.”

The staircase retains its original oak paneling and brass caps. The steps, once covered in cowhide, have been carpeted in bison skin. Second-floor niches in the walls hold taxidermied animals — a bobcat, javelina, coyote and wild turkey — to evoke the wilder aspects of the West.

“The grand staircase acts as a conduit, or a metaphor, to carry the restoration all the way up to the third floor,” Karr said.

One of the more impressive spaces in the museum is the mezzanine, a gallery with paintings and photography overlooking a fully detailed reproduction of a Wells Fargo stagecoach.

“We designed the mezzanine level almost as a series of bridges floating in space,” Wallace said.

The Work Gallery, which will feature a 1900 John Deere chuck wagon, a 1950 Aermotor windmill, and paintings and sculpture devoted to labor that tamed the West, features a stunning wall of original windows overlooking the San Antonio River.

“The architecture and flow of the building is oriented toward the river,” Karr said.

The river side of the Guenther Pavilion is glass walled and modern, but Lake | Flato took cues from other historical buildings in the overall design, as well as in small details such as exposed downspouts.

“That idea came from the San Antonio missions,” Wallace said. “Everything we did we wanted to have a reason that harked back to place and region.”

Lake said the museum “speaks directly to the history of downtown.”

“The idea is to make downtown stronger, not just for the tourism industry, but to serve as a destination for San Antonians,” he said. “And to do that you have to pay attention to these special places, such as historic buildings, that are downtown. It's really important for us to do historic work.”

But cowboy art in an art deco palace?

“Why not?” Lake said. “The art deco period really resonates. It's very fluid. Great civic buildings have come out of it. I've seen art deco buildings put to many different uses. This is a good one.”